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January 13, 2013

Aaron Swartz, American Hero

Paul Graham, the founder of angel investing firm Y Combinator, has mentored generations of Silicon Valley whiz kids. In an essay about hackers and the role they’ve played driving technology forward, he wrote that “hackers are unruly. That is the essence of hacking. And it is also the essence of Americanness.” Those three sentences are a perfect description of one of Graham’s mentees in particular: Aaron Swartz.